Gift voucher code "christmas2018"

This festive season, mailbox.org is giving away Christmas vouchers worth 6 EUR each, which can be used when registering a new account up until 10 January 2019 by using the code „christmas2018“. If you would like to communicate securely with all your loved ones in the future, simply put our gift voucher under the Christmas tree this year.

The voucher code „christmas2018“ can be used when registering a new mailbox.org e-mail account up until 10 January 2019. The code must be entered during the second step of the registration process. As usual, all new customers will continue to benefit from the initial 30-day trial period, which is completely free of charge.

If the new user likes our service and makes the first payment to top up their account credit balance, we will automatically add 6 EUR of credit to that amount. The bonus credit is sufficient to cover the cost of a basic “Secure Mail” tariff for the duration of 6 months. Note that we have to follow this particular procedure to prevent the automated creation of new accounts by spammers.

The voucher is non-refundable and non-transferrable.

Please note:

The voucher code will only be valid when registering a new mailbox.org account. It will be given during the registration and will credit the new account after the first deposit the 6, - Euro as a bonus.

The voucher is non-refundable and has no cash value. The credit value of vouchers cannot be transferred to any other account.

We wish you a joyous and peaceful Christmas and a very Happy New Year.

]]>https://mailbox.org/en/post/mailbox-org-as-a-christmas-giftWed, 12 Dec 2018 10:46:00 +0000https://mailbox.org/en/post/mailbox-org-as-a-christmas-giftA new logo, a new website, new software versions, and new features at mailbox.org

New mailbox.org logo and new website

The new mailbox.org Office 7.10

Many new features at mailbox.org

What we will be working on in the next few weeks

Bottom line: Our promise to you

It's done – we are online!

We are extremely pleased to present to you our new brand identity and many new features. This is a major step for mailbox.org as a company and a boost for our mission to promote secure communication for everyone.

New logo and new website

The new logo is probably the most obvious change at mailbox.org. The new logo is modern with a stark elegance and replaces the old hand-drawn version. It has been designed to fulfil important requirements: memorability, readability, and suitability for use in online media. We hope you like it!

Our decision to change the colours of the website is the result of a longer process, in part driven by the feedback we received from our users, many of which did not like the previous colour scheme. Green was our first choice because this colour generally stands for many things that fit our image: Alternative, different, sustainable, and fresh. It is also many people's favourite colour and not yet used by any of the larger e-mail providers. It will therefore be useful for us to build up mailbox.org as a brand that people can easily memorise but also differentiate from others like Google, GMX, Web.de, or 1&1.

Green suits mailbox.org really well because we offer an alternative to the big providers and because we do things differently. Our loyality is with our customers and not with advertising partners. We protect your data, develop new features that facilitate secure communication, support projects and organisations that promote open source software and data protection, joined the fight against encroaching data retention laws in the German high court, use eco-friendly energy to power our offices and our server infrastructure, and our bank account is with the German bank for social economy. Just to name a few reasons.

The new website has been improved both visually and structurally. Things are now easier to find and we also wanted a new look and feel that includes visuals from our base location in Berlin. The business customer area has been properly integrated into the website and information is more clearly presented, so that prices are more transparent, for example.

The new mailbox.org Office 7.10

With the website relaunch, our mailbox.org Office comes with the new software version OX 7.10. There will be some significant changes, and we were working for six months to prepare the rollout. Implementing these changes was quite complex and kept one of our admin teams and our developers busy for several weeks in a row. To do this while also pushing forward a new website and brand relaunch is crazy but that is how things have panned out, time-wise, and our team has worked incredibly hard and managed to get everything done.

We are one of the first providers world-wide to run the new version and as such, the next weeks and months are also going to be a stress test of version 7.10. There was a phase of comprehensive testing before we went live, so we're not expecting massive problems – however, there are always surprises when a system like this goes live in a real environment with so many users. We therefore ask for your understanding should we discover a bug or two in the process that needs fixing. We at mailbox.org and our colleagues at OX are anxious to find out how the new version and its features will be received.

The new Office has many cool features for users to look forward to – here just in brief:

The calendar application has been entirely reworked over a time period of one and a half years and many parts were comprehensively redeveloped. Doing so has solved many existing problems that were originally rooted in the previous code design. It is now possible and much easier to use several calendars, switch to a birthdays view, or subscribe to external data sources like public holiday or football calendars – to name a few.

Note: After enabling version 7.10 today, we still need to do a number of database updates before we can enable all new features. That means the full range of functionality will not be available right from the start but some time later (next Weekend). Thank you for your patience.

In the new online office, windows now work similar to how they would on a desktop PC. So, it is not just possible to open those so-called „Flying Windows“, but also to change their size, or minimise and park them in the task bar. One can also have several windows open at the same time to work on several e-mail messages simultaneously, for example. All this makes the user experience much more similar to that of a non-web-based client program - give it a try!

Also note the new start bar, through which users can now also access the mailbox.org settings menu.

Web-chat/XMPP: Our XMPP server has received a total overhaul and now has the best-possible SSL/TLS security rating just like all our other services. Among the many new features is the chat encryption via OMEMO. We are proud to have achieved a clean score of 100% on the XMPP test platform. We thank Daniel Gultsch (Conversations app), Holger Weiß (ejabberd server) and JC Brand (web-chat system converse.js) for their help.

Please note: The web-chat integration into the mailbox.org Office has not been fully completed yet, so that currently, there won't be any notifications for new incoming messages in the task bar yet. We are also working to make it possible to display a chat window when users are doing other things in their office interface. For these reasons, the web-chat system currently still requires a separate login.

Many new features at mailbox.org

Our website relaunch also brings a number of new features, most of which are accessible through the settings:

Digital heritage: Although this is a difficult topic that many would rather avoid thinking about, it is important that users decide during their lifetime what we should do with their account data and login credentials in the event of their death. This will give us clear guidance on how to act in their interest in our communication with heirs should the worst come to happen.

Empty e-mail trash after 30 days. This feature has been on the wish list of many of our users. Normally, it is not a good idea to automatically delete mail messages on the server. However, we are prepared to make an exception for any e-mail messages that were moved to the trash – if you explicitly want and enable this feature in your settings. Please note that this will only affect IMAP folders with the name “Trash” (Which is the default name at mailbox.org, so the vast majority of our users don't need to worry about it).

Encrypted Sent folder: Previously, it was technically not possible to encrypt the e-mails that were sent from an account residing in the “Sent” IMAP folder. We have now found a solution for this and as of today, the Sent folder can be fully PGP-encrypted. Please note this change and be aware that for technical reasons, it may take up to two hours for a PGP key that was enabled for the Inbox folder to be available for the Sent folder.

Learning spam filter: Our new office introduces the button “Report Spam”, which has the effect that the affected e-mail will be moved into the spam folder. This then helps the spam filter to recognise similar messages more easily, which increases the detection rate. This “training” process is local to each account, because one man's regular e-mails are another man's spam. In other words, each account will only ever train their own spam filter, so that there won't be any unwanted interference with other mailbox.org users. Please take care when using this feature and do not report e-mails that you would not normally consider spam (such as regular newsletters), as this would cause undesirable side effects.

Have-I-been-Pwned: Whenever someone becomes victim of a phishing attack, it is only a matter of time until their e-mail address and account login will be offered for sale on dubious trading platforms. If this happens, it won't take long and criminals take over the account. They can then retrieve any usable information from the user's e-mails, or use the account to send spam e-mails from within the mailbox.org network. The project „haveibeenpwnd.com“ helps our users to check if their e-mail address has been hi-jacked this way. Through our cooperation with them, we at mailbox.org are able to collect this information and directly alert our users with a warning message. Note: Currently, this will only work for @mailbox.org e-mail addresses – however, we are working with our friends at haveibeenpwnd.com to expand alerts for those who use custom domains names with mailbox.org.

Guard or Mailvelope? Our users have different preferences when it comes to PGP encryption. One group think the best solution is to use our Guard application that stores the PGP key securely on our systems. The other group prefers to use the browser plug-in Mailvelope to store the key locally – even though security experts have expressed security concerns about doing so: The plug-in area of web browsers is not considered a safe place for storing private crypto keys. Whatever your preference, we will continue to offer the two alternatives and allow users to switch between the two variants. However, do note that only one mechanism can be active at any time. Also: Always back up your private key from Guard before attempting a switch to Mailvelope.

What we will be working on in the next few weeks

Are you missing anything that we should have announced? Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to implement all the items from our users' wish lists in parallel. We have also deliberately delayed the release of certain features because these require substantial changes in our system configuration, which would have clashed with the other elements of the relaunch.

The following items are currently being implemented:

Relaunch afterworks: There will be adjustments in the visual presentation of various frontend elements, including the support portal, user forum, our social media accounts, knowledge base, and billing.

Team-Mail: In the next few weeks, our family account will be upgraded to a team account, and receive new user management features as well as a new billing option that allows split payments for individual accounts. With this, we are delivering on a request that was frequently put to us in the user forum in the past. On the website, the team account is already present, however we will need a bit more time for finishing the implementation of the user management part.

A new helpdesk portal: We are still not happy with the current state of the new helpdesk portal. Important planned changes and usability improvements are still not finished because the relaunch has required us to focus on other parts of mailbox.org in the previous months. However, there has been progress and an internal test system has been running for a few weeks with which we prepare the relaunch of our helpdesk. We can't wait to see the day when the system finally goes online and delivers the quick, practical, and helpful service that we would have wanted to see right from the beginning.

Different themes and colours: Not everyone liked our old colour scheme, and we are aware that not everyone may like our new green look of things. As soon as our graphics designers are finished with website relaunch afterworks, they will explore any options with which we could possibly provide additional colour schemes, including the old orange colour.

DKIM key management: In our latest development, we have turned the DKIM key management system for custom domain names on its head. The idea is that it shouldn't be the user who uploads DKIM keys to our system, as this is prone to errors. Wouldn't it be much better and safer if the system generated individual DKIM keys for each domain and then offered a download link for the key? While this doesn't have much relevance for many ordinary users, there are advanced and business users who need to publish DKIM keys in their DNS.

We have a few other things in the pipeline but do not want to reveal too much about these just yet, only that these are features that are also very close to our heart. ;-)

There are a few feature additions that we would like to see in the mailbox.org Office. We used our visit to the Open Xchange conference „OX Summit“ in Rome in September this year to discuss possible implementation approaches with our colleagues of OX. We are now looking forward to digging further into the details and making it happen, thereby also contributing to the further development of OX.

The bottom line: Our promise to you.

We maintain our promise to work towards facilitating free and secure communication for everyone and to protect your private data. Although our look is new after the relaunch, our prices, tariffs, and basic services have not changed.

What now?

We look forward to receiving your feedback in the user forum, on Twitter, or through your next support ticket.

After eight months of busy work behind the scenes, we can now announce that from next week, mailbox.org will present itself in a new outfit. There will also be a range of new software features for you to look forward to.

We are going to relaunch our website on the 14th of November, where users will notice a new logo, different coloursand better structurethroughout. We hope that the various improvements made on the site will make our services more transparent and any information that people look for easier to find.

At the same time, we are also upgrading the mailbox.org Office to a new software version. This upgrade will bring improved usability and performance and also implement new features that have been in the making for some time. In particular, the calendar function was comprehensively reworked over the last year and a half, and we were able to resolve many existing issues in the process. We greatly appreciate all the input received from our active users who have helped us identify the things that needed improving. Moreover, there are several new features coming out that we are very proud of and these will launch next week as well, with more details to follow very soon.

Our team is really looking forward to the relaunch and the new “mailbox.org 2.0”. Everyone is still quite busy making sure everything is going to work as expected – it is probably not unusual that aside from meticulous planning, relaunches also involve a lot of tinkering, testing, and optimising until the last minute!

It is now only a few days until everything will be ready, so don’t be surprised when you visit mailbox.org next week and everything suddenly looks a bit different. The one thing that will never change is our commitment to our mission and our users: We thank you all for the trust you put in our work and look forward to receiving your feedback on the new developments - be it in the user forum, on Twitter, or by e-mail to our support team.

Our XMPP chat service has been around for a while and its age is now showing, as support for some features is missing our out of date. Who better to ask for advice than Daniel Gultsch, creator of the popular XMPP app „Conversations“, which incidentally, is being widely used by our own team here at mailbox.org.

Daniel did not just develop the XMPP client app https://conversations.im, he also operates an XMPP chat server and offers related hosting solutions to his customer base. Enabling and maintaining free and secure communication over the Internet is a mission that is as important to him as it is to us. We are grateful for his assistance and enjoy the open and cooperative spirit of our collaborative work.

Peer Heinlein and Daniel Gultsch originally met at conference events. Daniel was subsequently invited to Berlin and took us up on the offer to run an XMPP training workshop for our team of mailbox.org administrators, which has delivered many valuable insights. The facilitation of secure communication and privacy was frequently at the heart of the discussion, and our helpdesk colleagues contributed their experiences from frontline technical support to the debate. It was also important to us to consider the kinds of obstacles and problems that our users have reported. Among other things, this has helped us gain a deeper understanding of the XMPP encryption mechanism OMEMO, for example.

Another result of the workshop was that we decided to replace our old XMPP server software Prosody with ejabberd in the future. A first prototype of the new XMPP server was set up together with Daniel and the final implementation and testing will be completed in the coming weeks. However, there is still a lot to be done and it will be some time before we can finally switch over to the new server software on our live systems.

Our users are also in for a nice surprise! At this point, we will only say that Daniel has helped us address an issue that has been close to our heart and present on our wishlist for a long time. We look forward to telling you more in the near future.

Starting Tuesday 10 p.m. CET our team will make extensive changes to our database cluster in order to support the new Open-Xchange Version 7.10. These changes will result in a temporary inaccessibility of our webmailer, user-forum and ActiveSync. This will last for about 3 hours.

Sending and receiving e-mails via IMAP and SMTP should work as intended. Our admins and developers will be doing their best to keep this timeframe as short as possible.

A research team around Professor Sebastian Schinzel from the University of Applied Sciences in Münster, Germany, has announced that they are going to go public with details about a newly discovered vulnerability in PGP on Tuesday this week. This discovery could cause ripples across the Internet, as many modern communication services depend on the asymmetric encryption technology that PGP provides.

There appears to be a previously unknown bug in the implementation of many PGP software programs. If an attacker manages to manipulate an encrypted message prior to transmission, then the content may get transmitted as plain text. In effect, this vulnerability could compromise world-wide e-mail communication, if exploited.

mailbox.orgGuard appears to be unaffected for now

At this point, all the checks we have carried out suggest that the PGP implementation of mailbox.org IS NOT AFFECTED. In none of the tested scenarios were we able to replicate the supposed exploit. Any manipulated messages were reliably identified and caught by the Guard PGP system. As a result, no mail contents were transmitted without encryption, which gives us some confidence that the Guard system is probably not compromised like other implementations.

Update: The information provided in their paper alludes to a problem with Mailvelope that is not really new and not related to any mailbox.org services, but a more fundamental issue with Mailvelope and general web browser behaviour.

Precautionary measures that users can take

Some vendors of affected software were informed in advance about the security problem and have taken countermeasures as a result. Although the team of researchers from Münster advises users to disable PGP entirely, we think updating mail clients and PGP tools to their latest versions is always a good idea. As far as we could determine in our tests, up-to-date versions of Enigmail for Thunderbird appear to have relevant fixes in place already.

While the researchers who reported on the vulnerability are asking users to disable PGP, we think there is little justification for such a drastic measure. Why should users keep using PGP? We think no one should disable encryption out of fear of the vulnerability at this point, as this would mean sending messages in plain text anyway. At the end of the day, Man-in-the-Middleattacks are even more likely if messages are not encrypted at all, whereas the number of users targeted by a specific exploit will likely be limited in comparison.

Based on what we currently know, the only way to keep sensitive data secure is to not send them by e-mail at all – with or without PGP. If alternative secure communication channels are available, then that’s a good option but apart from these, users need to realise that general security against interception of encrypted e-mail is currently compromised.

However, the question remains if the problem is really as dramatic as it has been presented in the research publication and the subsequent media coverage. The research group from Münster has promised to release a list of affected programs and versions.

It appears that many current implementations are not affected, and it will usually be sufficient to suppress the use of HTML messages to be on the safe side. Based on what our own team was able to find out, Thunderbird can be secured by

Thunderbird: How-to

Select the following from the menu bar: View → Message Body As → Plain Text

Still, it is obvious that the receiver of a message needs to do the above if the settings are to have any effect, and the sender of an encrypted message won’t necessarily know if this has happened. Note that for a possible exploit to work, it is irrelevant if the message sent was in HTML format or not.

For e-mail professionals: DKIM could help but is not widely available yet

If DKIM and DMARC were widely used by e-mail providers, then this would help in the detection of manipulated messages. This goes to show how important the consistent and widespread use of parallel security measures is for digital communication. For good reason, we at mailbox.orghave been using these technologies for some time and make sure all outgoing e-mails are properly signed. However, since DKIM is still not used by all providers, the benefits to communication security are rather modest on the wider scale. Also, the few mail clients that do support DKIM are still having problems with preventing the automatic display of a received message when DKIM records indicate that the message has been manipulated. We hope the newly discovered security vulnerability will motivate more providers to adopt these technologies and work hard to further their distribution.

Considering the fact that 1) non-secure communication that transmits data as plain text is not a solution, 2) users with increased security requirements can use workarounds to avoid the exploit, and 3) many implementations were fixed some time ago or not affected in the first place, we are wondering why the team of researchers at the University of Applied Sciences in Münster engaged in publicising their results the way they did. Those who demand the wide-spread deactivation of PGP encryption are not doing the users and professionals who are concerned about e-mail security any service. It’s quite the contrary, as the resulting media echo has shown.

We can only assume that the researchers may have had an increased desire for publicity and got carried away a bit in the process. Unfortunately, the result was that national newspapers picked up the story to report that „PGP has been cracked“ and other such nonsense. This is not true. PGP encryption has NOT been compromised and is still secure. While a significant vulnerability lies in the handling of HTML e-mails in some mail clients – this problem has been known for a long time.

In the second part of their paper, the researchers reveal what is potentially a real security vulnerability in PGP – however, they also point out that there isn’t actually any known attack that would enable anyone to exploit this vulnerability. Maybe this would have somehow justified a headline along the lines of „PGP has been cracked“. However, the developers of Gnu PGP and GPG4 Win have issued a joint statement explaining that the attack scenario described in the paper was already known in 1999 and fixed in the subsequent year, so that the described exploit has no longer been possible as of summer 2000. So, all that was reported yesterday was just hypothetical false alarm, based on incomplete research, it appears.

As a result, different media outlets have already started issuing correction statements. However, progress is sluggish. The German daily “Die Zeit” simply amended their article heading to defuse the strong wording previously used but still suggests to their readers that PGP encryption has been compromised somehow. This is quite misleading, as those who are not technically-minded or sufficiently experienced to be able to question the media reporting will not realise that it is not the encryption that is at fault (If anything, it is the particular mail client used). But the story continues to resonate in the media and statements like “People need to trust the recipient” and “No one can be sure that an encrypted message may not be openly published somewhere” are not helping at all. It would be much more important to point out that many users lack proper virus protection and keep working with PCs that have been infected by programs that make it a lot more likely for their data getting stolen. If the media outlets’ motivation was to increase circulation of their product, they might as well have used a headline like „Researchers are saying that computers should not be used“. But we’d rather not give them any ideas…

]]>https://mailbox.org/en/post/pgp-exploit-efail-discovered-mailbox-org-guard-appears-unaffected-though-6438Wed, 16 May 2018 10:21:47 +0000https://mailbox.org/en/post/pgp-exploit-efail-discovered-mailbox-org-guard-appears-unaffected-though-6438We are introducing a new helpdesk system to improve our customer support

It was nine months ago that we started the process of introducing a new software system for our support team. Many parameters and details needed considering and adjusting to ensure a seamless transition from the old to the new. Now, we are very pleased to announce the upcoming launch of our brand-new support ticketing system in February 2018.

We frequently receive support tickets that contain common questions, where good answers can also be found in our knowledge base. We have improved our software to make this repository easier to use and search through, to improve how our users can find the information they need.

In the future, support requests can be made through our new dedicated web portal at https://help.mailbox.org. Upon starting to type the problem description, a list of potentially helpful knowledge base articles will be displayed to the user, which gets more and more refined the more information is provided. So, hopefully, a fitting answer can be presented right away if it happens to be in the knowledge base already. This might make raising an actual ticket unnecessary in some cases, which reduces the load for our support team. As a result, they will be able to react quicker and spend more time with the other cases that really require their attention.

Whenever a ticket is required, the improved workflow will enable us to help our users more quickly and more specifically. Also, references to existing helpful entries in our knowledge-base will be easier to provide for our support members under the new system.

Internally, our software development team has been working with a system called “Jira” for a long time, and the new customer support system is now also based on the same solution. The move away from “OTRS” towards “Jira ServiceDesk“ will make many things easier in the future. Ideas and problems can be exchanged more uniformly between end users, developers, and admins. Similarly, we will have a standardised channel of communication between the various units that may be involved in solving a problem.

To the point: How will the mailbox.org customer support work in the future?

There are three main contact points available for any questions concerning mailbox.org:

2. User forum

This forum is where mailbox.org users help each other. Over the previous years, many different issues have been discussed, and a variety of tips and solutions to individual problems published here.

If you experience a problem or have a question, have a quick look if this was previously discussed here and if not, then feel free to ask your question in the forum. Use your account credentials to log in to the user forum.

The user forum is also an excellent source of information for individual questions concerning the use of third-party software in connection with mailbox.org. Due to the huge amount of external software in existence, we are unfortunately unable to provide specific support for all these solutions, so the user forum is your best bet for information and advice.

Our staff members are trying to keep an eye on what is going on in the user forum and will sometimes engage and help with issues whenever their time permits. However, please be aware that staff participation in the forum is entirely voluntary. The forum is not part of our official support processes and any cases discussed here will not be tracked systematically.

3. Technical support

Log in to the support system using your mailbox.org main e-mail address and password. Here, users can get directly in touch with our technical support by filling in a web form, in case a query cannot be resolved through existing answers in the knowledge base or the user forum. Please note that this support channel can also be used if the mailbox.org e-mail account is currently unavailable. The knowledge base is also integrated in the support system for convenience.

We hope that our users will benefit from the new helpdesk system in the future and find any information and advice they require a lot easier than before. In the upcoming weeks, we may still need to perform some last-minute tweaks and optimisations, and possibly even remove a bug or two before everything runs smoothly. Therefore, we hope for your understanding should something not work as intended from the start – our team also needs to learn and adapt as the new helpdesk system becomes integrated into their everyday work. Any feedback our users give us will be greatly appreciated!

The mailbox.org admin team has been working hard to improve our infrastructure, with the result that our server systems now accept connections via the latest version of the internet protocol IPv6. Customers who use devices that support IPv6 will benefit from connections that get established quicker and show improved latency.

mailbox.org now offers all customers the option to use IPv6-based connections to our server systems. With our latest infrastructure update, e-mail services, website, and the cloud office can be accessed through this latest version of the internet protocol. With IPv6, customers benefit from lower latency times and better connection speed. The only requirement: Devices and internet connection at the client side need to be able to “speak” IPv6 as well. However, most broadband- or cable internet providers will support IPv6 already and those that don’t will likely do so soon. Needless to say, mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers increasingly communicate via IPv6, too.

For example, if a compatible device connects to “imap.mailbox.org” to retrieve e-mails, then that server will automatically resolve an IPv6 address without the need for any separate configuration. Devices that do not support the new protocol version can still use all services as usual with the IPv4 protocol, because mailbox.org provides interfaces for both the old and the new protocol in parallel (Dual Stack).

The new technology also helps increasing our reach towards other parts of the world. For instance, most of the broadband connections on offer in Asian countries have already dropped support for IPv4 and exclusively communicate through IPv6. If internet services don’t support the new protocol, they remain practically invisible to these users.

mailbox.org services that can be accessed through IPv6:

Website: https://mailbox.org, user forum, helpdesk, knowledge-base

Cloud office: https://office.mailbox.org

E-mail (IMAP): imap.mailbox.org

E-mail (SMTP): smtp.mailbox.org

CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV: dav.mailbox.org

HKP-Server: pgp.mailbox.org

Download-Links: share.mailbox.org

In summary, all our systems that users communicate with directly support both IPv4 and IPv6. On the back-end side, the MX relay servers, which internet providers use to exchange e-mail traffic, still run on IPv4. We decided not to upgrade these just yet, as we expect there may be communication problems if we did this too soon. The reason is that not all providers (and especially the spam protection software they use) would currently cope equally well with the new protocol. There is also no real technical advantage in upgrading the MX relays to IPv6, so leaving things as they are for the time being will protect users against unwanted side effects.

About IPv6

The number of internet-connected devices is growing at an increasing scale, and it is foreseeable that the amount of internet addresses that can be provided under the IPv4 protocol will soon not suffice any more. IPv6 offers a vastly greater address space to solve this problem – about 340 sextillion addresses as opposed to IPv4’s 4.3 billion addresses.(*) In some Asian countries, IPv4 addresses are already getting scarce, leading to many providers requiring IPv6 for all internet connections. The “old” IPv4 protocol is still more widely used in Europe but its replacement with IPv6 is already in progress.

]]>https://mailbox.org/en/post/technical-infrastructure-update-mailbox-org-is-now-accepting-ipv6-based-connections-6448Fri, 02 Mar 2018 10:15:00 +0000https://mailbox.org/en/post/technical-infrastructure-update-mailbox-org-is-now-accepting-ipv6-based-connections-6448You can now donate your remaining credit balance for a good cause when you cancel

Update: 29 June 2018

We have made some further adjustments to the handling of residual credit balances at mailbox.org. In any case, we will always fully refund any remaining credit balance if a subscription is cancelled within the first 14 days.

Last year, we took the step to abolish the minimum top-up amount of 12 Euros that previously applied to every transaction. This meant that our customers were now able to increase their credit balance by any amount they like. We recommend customers top-up their accounts regularly but maintain just enough credit for the next month or two. This way, the accumulation of large credit balances can be avoided and they don’t become a problem should there be a cancellation at some point in the future. As this is an effective way of keeping account balances small, we ask for your understanding that we do not refund residual balances to individual customers after the initial 14-day period, as the overall effort in time and payment fees would be considerable.

We would like to point out that any residual credits do not go into our pockets but are donated to a good cause. When a customer decides to cancel their account through the web interface, they can choose from a list of charitable organisations where the residual money should go to. We then collect all donated funds and make regular payments to these organisations.

Our users stay with us because they choose to, and not because we lock them into long-term contracts. Every private customer is free to cancel their subscription by the end of the calendar month. Although we are sorry if a user decides to go, we won’t stand in anyone’s way if that is what they need to do.

It has always been our policy to refund any remaining credit balance in full, no matter if there’s 50 EUR or just 2 EUR left in an account. However, in the majority of cases, we are actually dealing with very small amounts, and the truth is that refunds are quite costly, because they take a significant amount of our time and incur transaction fees. This is because any bank transfers made to the customer’s reference account or Paypal transactions need to be checked and issued manually, and unlike private bank customers, we as a business also have to pay for each transaction.

If we want to continue with our refunds policy, we must find an economically more viable way to deal with these small amounts. We therefore decided to offer more alternatives for our customers to let them choose what should happen with the residual credit when they close their account. This will hopefully lower our costs, and save resources that can be better spent on maintaining and improving our service for all users.

We have introduced a new option „Donate balance“. This will allow users to contribute their remaining funds to a charitable organisation after their account has been deleted. Several organisations and causes are available to choose from a list. Please note that we cannot issue donation receipts on behalf of these organisations. Should you not want to donate and desire a full refund instead, then this continues to be possible, of course. Please get in touch with our support team.

We hope this change will be appreciated by our user community, and we also hope all this won’t become relevant anytime soon for any of our satisfied customers who read this.